


Injured in a Shuttle

by kathrynmc



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Concussed Narrator, Concussions, F/M, Flash Fic, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Major Character Injury, Short & Sweet, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 16:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17564198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathrynmc/pseuds/kathrynmc
Summary: Tom Paris wakes up, concussed and injured in a shuttle. Kathryn Janeway is hurt badly. (This is injury fic, light on the comfort, and not romantic.)





	Injured in a Shuttle

He's on the floor, lying on his back, with a strange pressure on his chest. With his head turned and his cheek flat against the floor, he has a clear view of her, sideways.

She's sitting up against the bulkhead, and he can tell that her eyes are open. He can also tell that half her hair is matted dark with wet blood. He tries to call out to her, but manages only a strangled croak. Suddenly, he fears that he can't breathe, and unthinkingly his body heaves upwards. There's a sharp pain in his lower back, but the broken metal atop him is not too heavy for him to lift, and twist, until it clatters aside and he is free of it.

The long moment that he spends sitting there, looking at the piece of bulkhead in the red emergency lighting is what makes him realize that he, too, must have a head injury. Gingerly he feels the lump -- no blood -- but it's that sickening memory of blood that makes his stomach drop and his heart spike. He turns and she's still there, slumped, glassy-eyed, and that's a hell of a lot of blood, and as he drags himself across the floor of the shuttlecraft he feels with sick certainty that she is dead.

But she's not dead. Somehow, she's not even unconscious. Her lips move without movement from her head, without her eyes finding his or focusing at all. "Tom," she rasps, and his heart breaks again and his stomach is a knot somewhere near his groin and adrenaline is prickling icy-hot across his skin and somehow still all of this feels far away and somewhere else.

"It's bad," she slurs, and he's not sure what she means, because he's caught in a nightmare and he needs to find the medkit right the fuck now.

He manages to stand without throwing up, and he's felt his way to the compartment and pulled out the portable medkit, and felt his way back before he realizes that he hasn't said anything, that he should be saying something. Anything.

He kneels next to her, on the bad side, and he can intensely smell her blood and her fear. He thinks she's never smelled like that before. "I've got the medkit," he manages.

She's still unmoving. Carefully unmoving, he thinks. Consciously unmoving. "You're injured," she says, and he doesn't like that she sounds like she's thoroughly drunk. But the fact that she's talking sends thrills of relief through him. He's never seen her drunk, he thinks. Not really.

"Yeah." He has a concussion, he knows, though how bad can it be if he knows it? And whatever is wrong with his back, and his body feels like a massive bruise, but his hands are moving, flicking the switch on the dermal regenerator, and a little while ago he was standing up, and it's blatantly obvious to both of them that she's inarguably in worse shape.

He detaches even more as he parts her hair, watching the dermal regenerator work on the deep, dark, gash. He can see bone, but he doesn't think of it as bone, he thinks it's like the bulkhead of a ship. He can also see hair and blood caught up in the synthetic skin knitting under the intense blue light. It's an ugly job, an ugly wound, but the first thing he needs to do is stop the bleeding, because head wounds bleed like a motherfucker, as Pedro Luz used to say at Auckland. There's something else he's supposed to do after he stops the bleeding, he remembers, and when he sets down the dermal regenerator his fingers brush a hypospray. He checks through the canisters until he finds the right one. "For cranial swelling," he narrates as he pushes against her pulse point and hears the hiss of the injection. He's always though there was something strangely erotic about the kiss of a hypospray, the vulnerability of the neck, the penetration of the serum entering the bloodstream.

"Now you," he hears.

"What?"

He can see that it pains her to draw breath and repeat herself. "Now you, hypospray."

Oh. His own cranial swelling. He reloads the tube and realizes that her eyes are on him now, clearer, he thinks, though hooded, and that's how it happens that he's looking at her when he presses the injection to his own neck, trying to remember what he was just thinking about, and he sighs along with the release of the drug.

"Tom, listen to me." That edge of command sounds so strange in her slurred voice. He shivers. "I need you to check yourself for injury, bleeding. Touch your head." She's instructing him, like a child. "All of it... feel around. Look at your hands."

There's blood on his hands, but he knows it's hers. "It's not mine," he says.

"Take off your jacket."

He thinks he can check himself with his jacket on, but his hands are already fumbling to obey her, and he remembers the weight of metal on his chest. He feels himself up through his shirt. Nothing hurts, but he's starting to suspect that that's the adrenaline and the concussion talking.

"Lift it." He does, and she makes a small sound, and says, "Use the dermal regenerator," because as he looks down he too can see the massive bruising and it makes his throat close up. Yup, that looks pretty bad, doesn't it.

He's partway through the slow, gruesome process when he remembers that he should be using the tricorder to check himself for internal bleeding. Hell, he should be using the tricorder to check _her_. Fuck. He does that first, because her eyes are again half-lidded and when he says, "Captain," she responds only with the barest sound.

She has a massive blunt-impact head injury with multiple skull fractures and swelling to more than half her brain. The rest of her is fine. She's probably supposed to stay awake. Him too, but he's not sleepy. He taps her shoulder. "Captain." But her eyes have drifted to slits and she makes no response. He injects her with the stimulant, and her eyes tense shut.

"Nuuh," she protests, and his insides twist up. Her eyes stay closed, but he knows from her ragged breathing that she's awake and in pain. He doesn't think he should risk the sedative effects of an anesthetic. Instead, he turns the tricorder on himself. Well. That's a broken lower rib. Hasn't punctured anything important, but he really shouldn't be moving around on it. And yes, that's a concussion, though the swelling is already going down nicely. He considers taking a stimulant himself, but figures he might need to save them. He has no idea what state the shuttle is in. But right now, or maybe with his mind's acknowledgement of the break inside of him, the pain is coming back, and suddenly he very much needs to lie down and be still.

"We should talk to stay awake," he says from the floor. That's what people say, isn't it? He's back to tilting his head to look up at her sideways, where she's still slumped against the bulkhead. Her hair is still matted with blood. He has to remind himself that he used the dermal regenerator, that he stopped the bleeding. She doesn't answer, so he listens to the way her breathing catches unevenly. If the sound wasn't so reassuring, if she wasn't the unstoppable Captain, he might have been disturbed by the thought that she might be unable to speak. Instead, he starts a meandering conversation for the both of them.


End file.
